The Steve Jobs of Asia, North Korea's Kim Jong Un who already invented a wall garden to keep his citizens in and a reality distortion field, has now invented online shopping.

His brilliant idea is to allow people to use their North Korean debit card system to buy products from North Korean companies including women's clothing, bags, shoes, medicines, cosmetics, furniture and food. This will mean that rather than queuing for products, workers can have their products delivered to them by the postman.

Of course there are a few novel tweaks to the idea to keep people locked into the North Korean world. The site does not works on the World Wide Web but on North Korea's own intranet.

North Koreans call it the "domestic web" and it's been around for years, but not used very much, largely because very few North Koreans have personal-use computers that can go online at all.

While mobile phones are still largely absent from the countryside, it has become common to see people using them while walking down the streets of the capital. North Korea began allowing their broad use in 2008. By 2013, the number of mobile and smartphones mushroomed to about 2 million, or nearly one for every 10 North Koreans.

Best Korea's mobile phone network, Koryolink, started allowing customers to use their phones to look at a very limited number of local websites — such as the ruling party newspaper, the state news agency, a TV show download site, a local university site and a science and technology site called "Hot Wind" which sounds like MacWorld to us.

Okryu (pronounced ong-yu) is managed by the General Bureau of Public Service, a government organization that oversees shops, restaurants and producers of consumer goods. Bureau official Jong Sol Hwa recently confirmed the online shopping site, announced with much pride by state media last month, is up and running.

One of the good things is that North Koreans don't have to worry about their personal data ending up in the wrong hands and getting swamped with pointless advertising. Their personal data is already in the wrong hands and it is not giving it to anyone else.

During a demonstration for an AP Television News crew, a bureau official clicked on the site for the Kumsong Food Factory in Pyongyang and scrolled down to a pack of cream buns, which brought up a new page with prices which were the same as stores in Pyongyang.

The South Korean government is using Microsoft’s Kinect motion-based game controller to monitor the heavily guarded DMZ (Demilitarized Zone).

Freelance South Korean developer Jae Kwan Ko has developed the system so it can tell the difference between people and animals. Currently infrared systems in use along the DMZ, have a harder time determining whether a moving object is human and should be shot, or a fluffy bunny, which should be cuddled.

The Kinect-based system can send alerts of suspicious activity to the nearest military outpost. While the South Korean government reportedly installed the hardware at select portions of the DMZ last year, news about it is only emerging now. Despite that secrecy, the South Korean government is playing up Jae Kwan Ko’s contributions, highlighting him in the local media as an example of innovation and creative drive.

Microsoft originally intended the Kinect controller as a way to play Xbox 360 games via body movements and voice control

North Korea’s bellicose rhetoric has caused plenty of concerns already, and although it is very unlikely that it will lead to an actual war, Taiwan is already considering the impact of a possible armed conflict on the tech industry.

Taiwan is the world’s leading semiconductor marker, while South Korea ranks third, although it might outpace Japan quite soon for the silver medal. An armed conflict between the two Koreas would wreak havoc on supply channels in a matter of weeks, and it would also have a massive impact on Taiwanese companies.

Taiwanese Minister of Economic Affairs Chang Chia-juch said Wednesday that any regional turbulence would be bad for the economy. He noted that some short term adjustments to Taiwan’s supply chains could be made to mitigate the effects of the war, but in the long term Taiwan’s economy would be negatively affected.

"We will not be pleased to see it (Korean war) happen," he said, adding that the ministry has already offered suggestions for adjustment to various industry sectors.

However, Arthur Chiao, chairman of the Taiwan Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers Association, believes Taiwan’s DRAM sector won’t be affected by the tensions.

"Taiwan’s DRAM production capacity is in a fixed range and is unlikely to change in the near term,” said Chiao, who is also the chairman of Winbond.

However, the effects of a wider regional conflict, involving Japan, China and Taiwan, are simply too disastrous to even contemplate. If it comes to that, the shortage of NAND chips and Samsung phones will be the least of our worries.

The glorious South Korean military is beefing up its ranks with some off the shelf technology in the form of nine Android apps for troops in the field.

The apps include walkie-talkie communications functions, troop and military unit tracking with GPS, a real-time video relay app, an image based identification friend-or-foe app and a battlefield augmented reality system (BARS).

A defence official told The Korean Times that the military assessed the suitability of new apps and concluded that mobile software could be an asset for the country’s armed forces. Granted, ensuring a technical edge over the North Korean military that still fields WWII vintage armor and artillery doesn’t seem like much of a challenge.

Samsung’s Galaxy II was apparently tapped as a standard issue smartphone and it is estimated that the handset will be serviceable for at least five years.

So there you have it, Android is helping defend the democratic South against the red menace across the 38th parallel, while Apple is lining communist pockets in the People’s Republic of China.

Nexon, the Korea video game developer, has acquired a 14.7% stake in NCSoft according to a number of reports, and the company is confirming this. NCSoft is a fellow Korean publisher. While the two companies have been focused on different market niches, the decision seems to be sitting well with many we have spoken with.

According to Nexon, the purchase was part of a long-term partnership between the two companies. The 14.7% interest in NCSoft is said to have cost approximately $688 million dollars to get the deal done.

Sources tell us that the shares, which number around 3.218 million, were purchased from NCSoft Chairman and founder, Taek Jin Kim. With this purchase, Nexon is now the largest shareholder in the company.

The Korean Fair Trade Commission raided the studio's Seoul office to gather evidence as to whether or not Blizzard violated the country's law. There had been complaints in Korea that Blizzard was refusing to refund players who purchased and were attempting to return Diablo III.

Miffed punters who couldn't log into the game were denied a full refund by Blizzard, which said that it was under no obligation to do so under the game's contract. The studio claims that it has a strict policy of "no refunds" in the country if a product is used.

Players complained to the FTC and the commission responded by launching an investigation. The investigation will sort through the seized documents and evidence to see if there is a possible violation of Korea's electronic commerce and commercial contracts law.

Apparenlyt Diablo III players are not to be messed with and the FTC had loads of complaints. Blizzard has since vowed to increase server capacity, to improve the game for players but it is not going to give anyone's money back.

Korea's corporate regulator fined some of the country's top IT outfits with a $40.1 million fine for price rigging and consumer fraud. Samsung, LG, Pantech, SK Telecom, KT and LG in hot water along with some key telecommunications companies.

The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said the companies colluded to inflate the prices of mobile phones and then advertise they were offering considerable incentives. This practice effectively tricked consumers into believing they were getting a bargain for buying new phones. On top of the fine, the companies have been ordered to release information on how much they provided in incentives to fuel sales.

The FTC, in addition, took administrative steps to ban these companies from offering new sales incentives. The worst offender was SK Telecom followed by Samsung Electronics and mobile carrier KT.

Mobile phone manufacturers marked up the prices of 209 models they handed over to mobile service operators, while operators advertised they were offering discounts on products and services that should not have been so expensive in the first place, the regulator said. "Companies took advantage of the complicated price setting practice in the mobile telecommunications sector to trick consumers," an FTC official said.

South Korea is furious that the personal information of about 35 million of its Internet users were stolen in a hacking attack that originated in China. Normally South Korea has to worry about hack attacks from the North, but this time it does not think that “Dear Leader” has been on his computer console hacking them.

Internet and social media sites Nate and Cyworld were hit with the hackers looking for social security numbers and email addresses. According to the Korea Communications Commission the operator of the sites, SK Communications, alleged the attack originated from computers in China based on their Internet Protocol addresses.

For once it also does not seem to be a state sponsored attack either. Governments are not usually interested in the user IDs, passwords, social security numbers, names, mobile phone numbers and email addresses of the great unwashed. It is more likely Chinese criminal gangs who want to use the information for Phishing attacks.

According to NPR the attack would be the largest Internet hacking case to have taken place in South Korea.

A South Korean mother has been charged with killing her three-year-old son while she was tired from marathon internet game-playing.

The case is another where Internet games addiction has been highlighted as the cause. The 27 year old woman, identified as “Kim”, 27, played online games for about 10 hours a day.

Coppers said her house was like a rubbish site because she was a gaming addict. She beat the three-year-old and strangled him after he disturbed her by having a Nintendo on the floor.

She was cross because she was about to sleep after playing online games for four hours in the morning. The woman left the boy's body in the house for three days and her in-laws reported the death to police.

She mostly played online card games and liked raising virtual pets, the coppers said.

Boffins in South Korea have come up with a networking router which transmits data at nearly 40 gigabytes per second.

According to Technology Review the technique, developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology uses cheap commodity chips, such as those made by Intel and Nvidia, in high-performance routers, in place of custom-made hardware.

Software developed by the researchers could also serve as a testbed for novel networking protocols that might eventually replace the ancient ones currently in play. The current system means that commercial software routers from companies such as Vyatta can typically only attain transfer data at speeds of up to three gigabytes per second which makes the router a bit of a bottleneck.

Sue Moon, leader of the lab in which the research was conducted and her students Sangjin Han and Keon Jang developed software called PacketShader which they wanted to get a PC router to 10 gigabytes per second. Once they worked out the principle they were able to push it to 40.

PacketShader uses a computer's graphics processing unit (GPU) to help process packets of data sent across a network.